Secular Trans Feminism

Zinnia Jones is a writer and videoblogger, co-blogging with Heather McNamara and Lux Pickel. She's written extensively on the subjects of secularism, feminism, and being transgender. Since 2008, her videos have received over 8 million views, and her articles have been featured in Autostraddle, the Huffington Post, and The Fight magazine. You can reach her at zjemptv@gmail.com, or on Twitter at @ZJemptv, and her YouTube channel is at www.zinniajones.com.

About Lux Pickel

Luxander Pickel is a genderqueer atheist and nerdy Whovian. They care very much about human rights, destroying harmful social systems, and promoting rational thinking. Lux struggles with depression and spends a lot of their time playing video games. When less debilitated by chronic illness, they love to write about social justice and make art; on a good day they love chatting about sex and relationships from a poly-demi-pansexual perspective.

EVENTS

National Organization for jailing lesbian parents? Yep.

Jennifer Roback Morse, a spokesperson of the National Organization for Marriage, had some extremely poorly chosen words yesterday for lesbian couples who use donated sperm:

This is the appalling thing right there, I mean right there is the problem, okay? The way almighty God created our bodies, a man and a woman are supposed to come together in an act of love to produce a new human being. This is the way God wants the human species to continue, as a participation in his divine love and in his divine creative power. That is what is imprinted into our bodies, that’s what we’re supposed to do, that’s what we need to do, that’s what we want to do.

And what we’re doing now, Todd, as a result of the sexual revolution and all its fruits, is that we are in full-on retreat from human relationship between a man and a woman in order to create that child. So going online to buy sperm from a stranger is about as far as you can possibly get from the participation in divine love and divine creation. The fact that these two women want to have sex with each other has no bearing whatsoever on whether this should be permitted or not. You know, buying sperm on Craigslist should be abolished. Buying sperm at all should be abolished. And furthermore, these people should be in jail, I’m afraid.

I mean, you know, honestly, I just can’t even imagine where people think this is going to lead. You know, because the child is no longer a gift from God and a fruit of human love participating in God’s love. The child is now a product, manufactured by adults, and therefore the child cannot be fully the equal of its parent. The object cannot be the equal of its producer or its maker, you know. And so the further we go down this path, the further away we are going from the true ideal of equality before God, of equality before one another, of treating one another with dignity. And the child becomes a kind of chattel. So the legal complications and the sort of ick factor of all of this, it’s important to sort all that out and look at it, but let’s not take our eye off that ball, which is that we have defaced the creator’s plan and intention here by this behavior.

Wow! So, to recap:

Loving same-sex partners who want to raise a child of their own should be in jail for the crime of using sperm.

The children they raise, love, and care for are merely “products” and “chattel” that can never be fully equal.

For daring to want a child of their own to love, they’re now an “ick factor” and responsible for “defacing” the divine plan of the almighty creator of the universe.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. An organization that opposes committed, devoted couple, who want nothing more than to start a family and cherish and protect their children does not in any way stand on the side of marriages. They are not on the side of “family values”. They stand for the criminalization of marriages and families. They stand for the legal persecution and capricious incarceration of minorities. They stand for using the long arm of the law to enforce their own twisted theology on everyone.

Comments

I find it particularly ridiculous that she implies the children of hetero sex are NOT manufactured, ‘chattel’ treated as less than their creators. As if straight sex automatically means love, or love of the child it produces.

These women actively seek out reproduction. They deeply want to birth, raise and love a child. Can the same be said of every ‘natural’ parent?

Children of hetero parents are “fully equal” to their parents, but children with two moms are chattel? Umm…NOM’s preferred religion almost explicitly defines children as chattel who can never be equal to their parents. Hell, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Christian apologists use parent-child analogies to explain why “God” owns us for the entirety of our lives.

I’m having a hard time imagining this as anything other than pure rationalization. It seems as if she started with a conclusion (lesbians shouldn’t be able to adopt) and worked backwards until she found a reason that she could say with a straight face.

Sometimes with people from NOM or similar corners of the fundiesphere, you can tell that they actually believe what they say. I don’t think this is one of those.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. A reprehensible statement to back a poor policy position stays that way whether it is sincerely believed or espoused for political gain. Still frustrating, though.

People deciding to have children because they want to be parants!
Oh the Horror!
Clearly, having children because you have no choice in your reproduction because it was all decided for you by god makes the result so much more loved and valued…

This word salad “The child is now a product, manufactured by adults, and therefore the child cannot be fully the equal of its parent. The object cannot be the equal of its producer or its maker, you know.”

you know? No,I don’t, why can an object not be equal to or greater than its producer?

Also, does the sex act really give humans their value? If there’s any stigma attached to something other than penis in vagina reproduction, it’s clearly just some irrational ‘ick factor’ that people should outgrow. Would these people be equally repulsed if a man happened to ejaculate outside of a woman and they pushed the sperm inside? If this makes them view the child conceived that way, it seems more like their problem.

The other thing is religions view children, humans basically everyone is chattel, as was said before.

So conservatives treat children as their parents’ equals? Never noticed that,I must say.And the law in most countries does in fact treat children as “chattel” owned by their parents:Why else is infant circumcision,for one thing,even legal? Why do trans teens need parental consent for the medical aspects of transitioning?
so,so much projection here.

Hell, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Christian apologists use parent-child analogies to explain why “God” owns us for the entirety of our lives.

Not to mention their endless insistence that they should be able to teach their kids lies, beat and abuse them, and generally ruin their lives, and this is the parent’s absolute right, because the children belong to them.

THE MALICIOUSLY ANTI-GAY GROUP NOM IS USING REGNERUS’S HOAX “STUDY” AT THE SUPREME COURT.
SIGN AND THEN SHARE THIS PETITION TELLING REGNERUS’S UNIVERSITY TO INVESTIGATE HIM FOR MISCONDUCT. REGNERUS IS NOW DOCUMENTED AS LYING ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS ANTI-GAY-RIGHTS FUNDERS.http://tinyurl.com/dyv498r

The child is now a product, manufactured by adults, and therefore the child cannot be fully the equal of its parent.

Well, it’s a good thing that the law says children get rights upon being a born person and that we don’t use NOM’s definition. Conversely, is she actually suggesting that all the IVF derived people (including the sons of the sons of Mittens of Romney) are manufactured and thus aren’t really full people?

I thought God was supposed to be omnipotent. If that’s the case then any pregnancy that occurs happens at his sufferance. Instead tRoback Morse’s argument seems to indicate the energy waves generated by lesbians block God’s powers, or something. Seriously, fundies, make up your minds!

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Trackbacks

[…] Over the past year, Jennifer Roback Morse of the National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute has become increasingly vitriolic in her anti-gay comments. She has openly endorsed ex-gay therapy and lifetime celibacy for gay people, she has warned parents not to let their kids have gay friends, she has suggested marriage equality will destroy society, and she has claimed same-sex couples can’t be monogamous because they can’t have children. In a new interview captured by Equality Matters, Morse blatantly suggests that lesbian couples who seek out sperm donors — or who are “buying sperm on Craigslist” — “should be in jail” because they treat their children like property and “chattel.” Zinnia Jones has the transcript: […]

[…] Jennifer Reback Morse, who heads the National Organizatino for Marriage’s Ruth Institute, went on a radio show recently and declared that anyone who “buys sperm” in order to conceive a child — you know, like lesbian parents often do — should be in jail. Because of God, or something. Jeremy Hooper has the audio and Zinnia Jones has the transcript: […]

[…] it sounds like they’re the ones who want to radically restructure familial laws and norms. In an interview last week, one of their representatives, Jennifer Roback Morse made it clear that she not only opposes equal […]